Allergy-Friendly Dining

Allergy safety insights

Helping people with dietary needs dine with confidence

A mobile-first platform for finding restaurants with detailed allergy safety insights and community-driven ratings on food handling and accommodations.

ROLE

UX Designer

scope

Self-directed

timeline

24 weeks

context

Master's Capstone

problem & opportunity

What's broken today?

People with dietary needs often rely on platforms like Yelp and Google Reviews to evaluate restaurants, but these platforms aren't designed to surface information about allergy safety or dietary restrictions.

Users are left digging through pages of unrelated reviews, making it difficult to find clear, relevant answers.

Why existing tools fall short

Reviews focus on taste and experience, not allergy safety
Little visibility into food handling or cross-contamination practices
Information is inconsistent and hard to trust

Guiding question

How might we help people with dietary needs make more confident, safer dining decisions?

research & key insights

what i learned

Through a competitive audit and interviews with 16 participants (9 with dietary restrictions), I identified key patterns in how people evaluate restaurants for allergy safety:

Reliable allergy information is hard to find

Users often dig through multiple reviews to find a single relevant mention of allergies, if it exists at all.

Safety information is buried or inconsistent

Users rely more on shared experiences from people with similar dietary needs than on official restaurant descriptions.

Trust comes from other diners, not businesses

Users rely more on shared experiences from people with similar dietary needs than on official restaurant descriptions.

design direction

Translating insights into product decisions

These insights shaped a clear direction: prioritize clarity, trust, and allergy-specific information at every step of the experience.

Allergy-first search

Enable users to quickly find restaurants that match their specific dietary needs without digging through irrelevant results.

Structured safety rating system

Introduce a standardized way to evaluate allergy safety, separate from general food or service ratings.

Community-driven reviews

Focus on capturing diet-specific experiences, making reviews more relevant, comparable, and trustworthy.

MVP1 - inital solution

After exploring ideas through personas, storyboarding, and wireframing, I developed an initial prototype focused on core user needs.

This MVP translates key insights into a simple flow that allows users to search for restaurants, evaluate allergy safety, and make informed dining decisions.

Search

Filter by dietary needs

Business page

Safety insights breakdown

Write a review

Structured, diet-specific questions

testing & iteration

What i tested

I conducted moderated usability testing with 5 participants to observe how users navigated the MVP1 prototype and evaluate clarity, usability, and information hierarchy.

Feedback was synthesized into an affinity map to identify recurring usability issues and patterns.

Affinity map organizing user feedback on MVP1

key insights from testing

The feedback revealed recurring usability and clarity issues that directly informed the scope and priorities for MVP2, highlighting opportunities to improve hierarchy, structure, and the overall filtering and review experience.

Clarity and hierarchy need improvement across the experience

Users needed clearer descriptions, stronger visual hierarchy, and more visible emphasis on dietary filtering to understand the system quickly.

Filtering needs to better reflect real-world dietary needs

Users expected a more expansive list of dietary needs beyond the core allergens, including broader dietary restrictions and lifestyle choices such as vegetarian and vegan preferences.

Review creation needs more structure and simplicity

The writing flow lacked guidance, and users needed clearer prompts to share relevant allergy- and safety-related details.

Iteration: improving information hierarchy

One key issue emerged around the business page, where users struggled to quickly locate and prioritize allergy safety information due to unclear information hierarchy.

MVP1

Safety information lacked visibility and was not prioritized in the page hierarchy.

MVP2

Safety information was elevated and restructured into a clear, accessible breakdown at the top of the page.

bringing the designs to life

visual identity

The visual identity was designed to create a sense of trust, clarity, and approachability—helping reduce anxiety around dining decisions and supporting confident user decision-making.

color

White serves as the neutral base to maintain clarity and simplicity, while orange is used as a secondary accent color to draw attention to important information.

It also balances two associations: caution (highlighting safety-critical details) and encouragement (supporting confident decision-making).

typography

PoetsenOne was chosen for its friendly, readable character that evokes a casual dining feel, while Instrument Sans supports legibility for body text and interface clarity.

MVP2 - final designs

Diet-specific filter

Users can filter by a wide range of dietary needs to quickly find relevant dining options.

‍Why it matters: Expands beyond limited allergen lists and reduces the time and uncertainty of searching for safe places to eat.

GIF scrolling through an example business page, showing the safety information and reviews sections

Safety-first business page

Ratings, key details, and user insights are prioritized to highlight allergy safety at a glance.

‍Why it matters: Addresses the lack of clear, trustworthy safety information by making critical details immediately visible and easy to understand.

GIF that previews the process of writing a review

Write informative reviews

Users share structured, diet-specific experiences through a guided review flow.

‍Why it matters: Improves the quality and relevance of reviews, making them more useful and trustworthy for others with similar dietary needs.

impact

Allergy-Friendly Dining began as a personal project, but it reflects a broader need for more inclusive and trustworthy dining experiences.

“[AFD] would make eating out way less stressful because you’d know which restaurants are actually safe and take things seriously.”

“I could imagine [AFD] would really cut down on time, frustration, and risk.”

Users valued being able to read “first-hand experiences of which restaurants follow their [allergy] protocol.”

These responses highlight the potential for AFD to reduce uncertainty, build trust, and empower safer decision-making for people navigating dietary restrictions.

Recognition

I presented this project at a workshop hosted by the Service Design Network, where it received the Best Pitch award.

Sharing AFD with a broader design community and receiving this recognition reinforced both the relevance of the problem and the strength of the solution.

takeaways & next steps

Takeaways

This project challenged me to lead the full UX process independently while staying grounded in real user needs.

Designed for clarity and trust, making allergy information easy to find and act on
Balanced exploration with scope, focusing on an MVP that solves a real problem
Developed a cohesive visual identity to support confidence in safety-critical decisions
Built scalable Figma components, improving speed and consistency
Strengthened my ability to work autonomously, making thoughtful design decisions end-to-end

Next Steps

To evolve AFD into a more inclusive and robust platform, I would:

Conduct additional usability testing with more diverse users to validate accessibility and design improvements
Expand research to include a wider range of dietary needs (e.g., Halal, Kosher, lifestyle-based diets)
Design a Diner Profile to support personalization, saved places, and review management

Final note

Allergy-Friendly Dining reflects my belief that design can create spaces where people feel safe, supported, and seen by transforming moments of uncertainty into confidence and turning individual experiences into a shared sense of community.